We are headed for strangeness...

Well, my last paper of the semester is done (or almost done, I just need to write the damn abstract. Problem is, I don't know how to write an abstract. See, in the English world, we don't do that a whole lot, so I'm at a bit of a loss, and right now I just don't care.) I liked the reading I had to do for it, I mean, getting to read all this great stuff by Hunter S. Thompson and Tom Wolfe and I get credit for it?! Wow...

So, I came across this description Thompson wrote about his deadlines as he was covering the 1972 presidential election. Granted, my deadline hasn't been this bad, but who hasn't had these feelings at some point when they've been up against a deadline?

"There is a comfortable kind of consistency in this kind of finish, because that's the way all the rest of the book was written. From December '71 to January '73 -- in airport bars, all-nite coffee shops and dreary hotel rooms all over the country -- there is hardly a paragraph in this jangled saga that wasn't produced in a last-minute, teeth-grinding frenzy. There was never enough time. Every deadline was a crisis. All around me were experienced professional journalists meeting deadlines far more frequent than mine, but I was never able to learn from their example...
...Any $100 an hour psychiatrist could probably explain this problem to me, in thirteen or fourteen sessions, but I don't have time for that. No doubt it has something to do with a deep-seated personality defect, or maybe a kink in whatever blood vessel leads into the pineal gland...on the other hand, it might easily be something as simple & basically perverse as whatever instinct it is that causes a jackrabbit to wait until the last possible second to dart across the road in front of a speeding car...Why not? Anything that gets the adrenalin moving like a 440 volt blast in a copper bathtub is good for the reflexes and keeps the veins free of cholesterol."
-Hunter S. Thompson Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail '72

Now I just need to make it through class tomorrow night, hand this sucker in, and be done with it. I think I'll grind out the abstract tomorrow at work:)
Ciao,
S